Anyone who has a business website naturally wants to get more revenue from it. That means having people find it from google and yahoo searches. So of course, it’s desirable to rank higher for the search phrases relevant to you.

That means it can be financially viable to spend money to “optimise” your website pages. And, it is possible, you can do things which will influence where they rank.

But let’s take a step back, and look at Google and Yahoo. What do they want to happen when someone does a search?

They want the results to be good quality and relevant to what the person searched for. They want:

1. Sites which are properly constructed and readable
2. Sites which target the region the searcher is in (geographically)
3. Sites which seem good because they are linked to by what seems to other “authoritative” sites 
4. Information which is obviously highly relevant to what you searched for.
5. Sites which have more than one page about the subject.
6. Sites which are up to date and frequently add new content.
7. Sites which have got some history 

They dont want the results to: Continue Reading »

In November 2007 BT launched a major online area which I think will be an important asset for businesses http://blog.bttradespace.com/tips-and-tricks/create-a-community-for-your-bu.php

If you are interested in marketing online, this is the sort of thing you need to get involved in - for 2 reasons:

1. As a direct marketplace - this is somehwere to meet supplieres and customers.
2. As an indirect marketing tool. This is a very good example of the sort of thing that is good for the popularity of your site. Its a chance to particpate in online communities, join networks, and get your name out there.

Many companies who try to get involved in Internet Marketing go down the route of typical search engine optimisation techniques, and do things like buy links to their site,  or create a blog,just for the sake of it.  Thats increasing ly sen to b ethe wrong way to do things. Good internet markeing pays good search engine dividends - what google and yahoo want are websites that are genuinely active and participating in relevant online communities.

Tradespace incorporates both an area to advertise, and a community area, which at the moment is a bit empty, but I’m sure will soon fill up.

BT tradeplace looks like it will be the sort of place to kill two birds with one stone! -If you have some time to kill over the Christmas holidays, get a free account.

If you have a website and more than one domain name for that website, there are some important issues that need managed. If you don’t, it can mess up your search engine ranking.

How will it mess me up - why should I be concerned about this?

If you have lots of domain names pointing to the same site, the Google PR can end up being shared around each of them, so none of them rank very well. You want the PR to go to one domain name.
Google ranks local websites higher for local searches. One of the ways it knows you are a local website is if you have a local domain name, like .co.uk But that domain name has to be correctly associated to the website.

There are three scenarios to consider:

1. You already own a generic domain name like .com or .net (called a TLD) and you buy a new county code domain name like .co.uk or .ie (called a ccTLD) to get better rankings in your target geographic market.
2. You already own a ccTLD, but you want a more prestigious .com domain name to add to your stable.
3. You buy up various other domain names, which you like, or are similar to your main one, and you want them to point to your website.

How to manage the scenarios:

Scenario 1

What is required here is to park the ccTLD on the TLD and get a link using the ccTLD to an appropriate page on the TLD

Scenario 2

What is required here is to 301 redirect the TLD to the ccTLD

Scenario 3

What is required here is an IP funnel. This is a “feeder site” with a 301 redirect to the main site, with all the other domain names parked on the feeder site.
So if you own a website with more than one domain name its really important to manage the domains. following the guidelines above.